​​Tony Kulesa is a Principal at Pillar VC, where he co-founded an biotech-focused incubator, Petri, with many of the leaders behind companies like Ginkgo Bioworks, Twist Bioscience, Beyond Meat, PathAI, and many many more. He was one of the first investors in many pioneering biotech startups such as GALY Co, Nabla, Matterworks, and New Equillibrium Biosciences. Previously, he was the founding Director of the MIT BioMakerspace, a community biology laboratory and incubator space, and an Instructor at the MIT Department of Biological Engineering. He holds a PhD from MIT, where his inventions of new platforms for drug discovery and microbial therapeutics were highlighted in Science Editor’s Choice and Nature Reviews Drug Discovery.